


for you i'd bleed myself dry

by bittereternity



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, no seriously enough fluff to destroy your teeth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:05:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1001883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stray bullets, a rapidly devolving unsub and a marriage proposal. Just a normal day at the BAU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for you i'd bleed myself dry

*

You’re in a car with a beautiful  boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you. But he loves you.

-          Richard Siken, _You Are Jeff_

*

The thing is, he doesn’t even see the gun being fired and the bullet zooming towards him until it’s too late.

He can’t quite pinpoint how he let things go so wrong, can’t quite determine the exact moment when his concentration slipped just a fraction, just enough for the unsub to aim his weapon at him and slowly, with deliberate malicious intent, release the safety.

Except he can, really.

He’d been in the middle of talking down their latest unsub, all the while casting wary glances at the gradually lowering gun in his hand, convincing him that he still had children out there who looked up to him, who needed him to be present, needed him to be alive and better than just another statistic of suicide by cop.

The door directly opposite him -just behind the unsub- opens with the slightest creak,  and out of the corner of his eye, he can see the silhouettes of Hotch, Reid and Blake tiptoeing into the room, guns drawn and lips parted in concentration.

They stop right next to the door, taking care not to alarm the unsub into disturbing the temporary silence in the room. And his eyes flicker once, just once towards Spencer’s barely discernible profile, eyes narrowed and gun drawn, ready to strike at the first sign of unprecedented conflict. And for a quarter of a second, he slips. For a quarter of a second, he invests more, gives more significance to the sharp angles of Spencer’s profile over the gun that could be pointed at him at any moment.

By the time he looks up to meet the unsub’s gaze, barely a quarter of a second later, the bullet is already zooming towards him, deafening him in its silence.

*

“Our anniversary is coming up,” he tells Spencer over a particularly healthy meal of leftover Chinese dumplings and oranges on the verge of going bad.

Spencer nods distractedly, thumbing through the next few pages of his book fast enough to make Dave’s jaw drop open. It isn’t a sight that gets less magical over time, no matter how many times he sees it.

He leans over the table and covers Spencer’s fingers with his own, giving himself a mental point when the action causes him to look up. “You aren’t eating,” he replies in response to the pointed gaze directed at him.

Spencer hums under his breath and looks up at him, slips his hand from underneath Dave’s.

“It’s not very appetizing,” he replies, casting a disdainful glance at the shriveling dumplings on the plate. “I might finish off that ice-cream later.”

Dave sighs. “Spencer, I could have whipped something up for you if you had let me stop at the grocery store. Hell, _you_ could have cooked something for us if you had let me stop.”

Spencer gives him a _look_. “Does that mean that I’m allowed to touch your precious oven racks?”

“You have to _eat_ ,” Dave finishes in reply, voice laced with exasperation.

Spencer takes a long look at him before finally closing his book. “We had a long day,” he replies quietly. “I just wanted to get us home as fast as possible.”

Dave resists the urge to move forward and straighten his collar. “But you still have to _eat_. I, myself, have managed to swallow six of these,” he gestures in the direction of the dumplings, “ungodly things. And I know you, the hungrier you are, the more distracted you get.”

 _That_ catches his attention. “I am _not_ distracted,” Spencer exclaims.

“You haven’t listened to half the things that I’ve said.”

“But I’m not distracted,” Spencer insists. “I _am_ hungry and the calorie-rich ice-cream shall, I believe, provide enough nourishment and energy for one night. But I haven’t ignored you.”

Dave peers at him over his distasteful bifocals.  “So you heard the thing I said about anniversaries?”

Spencer smiles at him, close lipped and silent, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “I did.”

Dave hesitates for a second. He wants to prod further, but over the years, he’s also come to recognize the value of Spencer’s responses, the way he elaborates only if he feels it’s necessary, not because he lacks the knowledge of appropriate emotions to express, but because he simply finds no reason to express an emotion that he perceives to be always _there_.

Nonetheless, he opens his mouth to ask when he feels Spencer’s breath, warm and even falling over his ear. “If you go get that ice-cream,” Spencer whispers, and the luxuriant nature of his words send a shiver up his spine, “I’ll show you _exactly_ how I feel about what you said about anniversaries.”

Dave is a smart man, after all. He doesn’t hesitate twice.

*

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid_ , is the first thing he lets himself think completely, just as he hears the shot ring out and reverberate in the room. He doesn’t feel any pain at all, much less anything else even as he’s fairly sure that the bullet has hit him in some way, judging by the sound of a second shot ringing across the room.

He can see the unsub, visibly shaky with tears streaming down his face. He raises a slightly trembling hand to the point of numbness in his own left arm, just above his elbow and hisses with feeling for the first time since hearing the shots ring out. Blindly, he tries to feel around his arm, and although his hand is smeared red when he holds it up to his eyes, he finds no discernible source of the wound and no proof that the trajectory of the bullet had been _through_ him.

 _Graze wound,_ he thinks to himself, overwhelmed with the sense of relief meshing with the intensified throbbing of his arm. _It’s just a graze wound. It’s going to be okay_.

And then he looks, as is his weakness, straight ahead, right at Spencer who seems to have finally cuffed the unsub only to stare right back at him, lips parted and sweat beads accumulating on his forehead, one foot already towards Dave from across the room. Then he looks closely and notices the wild, uncontained look in Spencer’s eyes, eyes widened imperceptibly and gaze raking all over him, desperate and unabashed, an open plea for him to stay alive, stay put, _I am only one second away._

And Dave sees the fear, too, the fear lurking beneath the surface behind the lost nature of Spencer’s expression, a fear that he will not able to control the outcome of this event, and once again, he finds himself unable to look away from the naked uncertainty in Spencer’s eyes.

It’s not a look he’s ever wanted to see. In that moment, he closes his eyes briefly, just for a second, and hates himself beyond all reason, simply for being the one to cause that look in Spencer’s eyes. It’s not a look he’s ever wanted to be a part of.

He closes his eyes and feels like he’s thrown away something special, something significant and unique that he can never possibly recover. Distantly, he hears Spencer hurrying towards him, Spencer _right next_ to him, and he feels himself losing his grip over himself. At the back of his mind, he knows that there will be an ambulance ride, a flurry of tests, a tense period of time when no one really knows what to say to each other. As he finds himself falling, a part of his wants to reach out, tell Spencer that it will be okay, that it has to be okay, that he’s so _goddamn_ sorry but he can’t quite bring himself to open his eyes and look, not yet anyway—

He closes his eyes instead and doesn’t see Spencer catch him as he sways to the ground. He closes his eyes and stops seeing.

*

[there will be a ring too, hidden in one of his pockets, buried underneath drugstore receipts and a packet of gum and his wallet, buried so very effectively for weeks that the simple act of stowing it away in a hurry in the first piece of clothing he can find is a distant memory in itself.

Spencer will be the one to find it later, much later, long after he’s been rushed to radiology and in that delicate time frame before the nurse remerges to let them know that everything will be fine, everything will be all right, he will sit there with the box clutched tightly inside his hand, feet twitching away to a rhythm he can no longer remember.]

*

“How did you _know_?” Spencer asks him one afternoon as he rakes his fingers through Dave’s hair, causing him to bite his lip so as to not ceaselessly moan out loud.

“Know what?” Dave murmurs.

Spencer’s hands still. “This,” he begins with a slighty stumble , like he doesn’t quite know where he would like to go with this.

Dave folds his legs underneath him and sits up, faces him directly.” _This?_ ”

Spencer gives him a glare bright enough to burn down a building and he relents. “ _When_ did you know?” Spencer clarifies again.

He smiles slightly to himself, leaning forward to press a quick kiss on Spencer’s temple. “But of course, it was love at first sight,” he whispers gently into his ear, taking a slight pleasure at the way Spencer’s curls stir and settle back on his hair.

Spencer laughs out loud, startled and caught off-guard at the sheer fallacy of the statement. “No, it wasn’t,” he replies back, amused.

“No, it wasn’t,” Dave agrees.

“So? When was it?”

Dave frowns. “I don’t remember.” Spencer turns to gauge the sincerity of his words before frowning doubtfully. “You don’t remember?”

“I don’t think there was a definite _when,_ to be honest,” he spreads his palms over his knees. “It was more of a gradual build-up to an ‘aha!’ moment.”

“Ah,” Spencer replies quietly, as if to himself, and doesn’t press the issue further.

*

He wakes up to the constant, steadying beep of a heart monitor and Spencer sprawled on the ridiculously hard-looking chair next to him.

“I’m not dead,” he murmurs out loud, mostly to test his voice, because it’s as good a re-introduction as any.

Spencer stirs awake instantly and looks blearily at him for a couple of seconds before rushing to his side. “You stopped _breathing_ ,” he says, like he’d done it deliberately. “You could have been, for all anyone knew.”

“It was just a graze wound,” he exclaims, a little out of exasperation but mostly to help Spencer snap out of the mental image of him lying on the floor, possibly in not a little amount of blood.

“You were _unconscious_ ,” Spencer snaps, folding a corner of his bed sheet over and over between his fingers. “One moment you were standing there and then I blinked and you were on the ground.”

Dave breathes. The pain just above his elbow, once faded to a mere sting if he moves his arm too fast, now comes back in full force. Abruptly, he sits up the best he can and tugs the IV needle off his arm.

“We should go home,” he declares. Spencer blinks too, and pushes an arm lightly into his abdomen.

“Absolutely not,” he counters.

“It’s just a wound, Spencer. It’s scar tissue. It will heal just as well at home as it would here.”

Spencer elbow digs a little further into his stomach, just enough for him to grimace. “You were unconscious,” he repeats again, like Dave doesn’t _understand_ , “You were there and standing and then, and suddenly you weren’t.”

Dave reaches forward with grips both of Spencer’s arms with his own, ignoring the stinging protests emanating from his elbow. “Scar tissue needs time to heal,” he begins calmly, enunciating every word in a soothing rhythm. “What I have is an abrasion that hasn’t perforated into the skin. I am up to date with my tetanus shots, minimizing the risk of any latent infection. It’s just a _graze wound_ , Spencer,” he clenches his nails deliberately into Spencer’s arms and hears him wince.  “You know this,” he speaks clearly. “You _know_ this.”

Spencer’s head snaps back to look at him, eyes dazed and wide, but Dave can feel his breathing even out. “I know this,” he replies, half-mechanically, half in wonder.

Dave releases him abruptly. “Then let’s go home.”

Spencer frowns, still uncertain. “You were unconscious,” he repeats yet again, over and over like a harsh mantra that will cause reality to wash upon them.

“And now I’m not,” he replies simply, and takes both of Spencer’s hands in his own.

*

Dave will not tell Spencer this, but there _had_ been a moment, an all-encompassing brief moment of pure ecstasy from which he had begun to trace every single second of his _when_.

It’s purely selfish, he thinks sometimes, not sharing this with Spencer, stubbornly holding on to a memory of him without his knowledge. Mostly, he likes to think of it as treasuring an innate part of their relationship, saving a moment so unblemished that if the day comes when he’s lying on a floor staring up at the barrel of a gun (and he knows a fair bit of statistics too, he knows how far the odds are against him), he can close his eyes and just like that, just behind his lidded eyes will be that one rare moment solely for his own viewing. And sometimes, when he’s lying down next to Spencer, lazily looking at the calm rise and fall of his chest as he sleeps, he will let him close his eyes and think back, see, _watch_ over and over again:

He’s sitting at the kitchen counter pretending to read a magazine while looking at Spencer put the dishes away out of the corner of his eye. Spencer is talking without turning back, without requiring an acknowledgement that there’s someone behind him simply to listen, talking about a paper he’s read recently on the benefits of exercise in schizophrenic patients. From his vantage point at the kitchen counter, Dave can see the sweat pooling just underneath the nape of his neck, the gradual frizzing of his hair from the steam of the dishwasher, the state of general disarray of his shirt as he lets his mind wander, lets Spencer’s voice rather than individual words wash over him. He takes a deep breath and basks in the warmth radiating from Spencer’s voice, because this voice is the altar at which he can kneel to redeem himself, this voice is what makes his sun shine brighter in the mornings and makes it all right to look at a calendar and realize that his years are ticking away.

He looks up, only to see Spencer wiping the mugs with the dishtowel and he thinks, with a spectacular clarity that engulfs him all of a sudden in the most unassuming of ways: _I am going to marry this man someday._

*

Spencer doesn’t speak until they’re both inside the car, and he has satisfied himself by leaning over and checking Dave’s seatbelt.

“Yes,” he says quietly, just before putting his keys into the ignition.

The blood rushes to Dave’s ears in an instant. “ _What_?” is all he can manage to squeak out.

Spencer doesn’t reply, merely gives him a sideways glance before biting his lip and starting the car.

“How did you _know_?” Dave asks again, and this time, Spencer’s lips twitch.

“I found the ring,” he replies. “Not everything is about profiling, you know.”

“Have you _seen_ it?”

Spencer shakes his head. “You wanted to be the one to show it to me,” he replies evenly. “How could I deny you that?”

Dave takes a deep, shaky breath and feels the corners of his eyes sting, attributes it to the pain meds. “Are you sure?” he begins shakily. “I’m not--”

_Young. Enough. Deserving. Worth it. Why would you choose me when the world is out there, ready to throw itself down on your feet when all you have to do is ask._

_I am not the answer._

He starts slightly when he feels Spencer’s hand curl around his wrist, and when he turns around, he inhales sharply at the calm radiating from Spencer’s being, the glistening of his eyes, the slight smile at the corner of his lips that reflect themselves in his irises, the certainly in his every gesture.

“You’re everything,” Spencer replies firmly, and doesn’t let go.

*

**Author's Note:**

> written for o-aida's birthday over on tumblr. it's my first time writing rossi so i hope it isn't too far off the mark.


End file.
